HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot has allowed us to streamline our marketing efforts so we can focus on what really matters. With We've been able to automates so many mundane processes that we used to do manually thanks to HubSpot workflows. HubSpot's ease of use also makes training and transferring ownership/management of the tool more efficient.

What I liked:
• Simple, intuitive fool-proof interface
• Great support and learning resources
• HubSpot Academy makes it easy to learn marketing automation
• Workflows look like they were designed by a kindergartener-- I love how simple they are to understand and build

Six months into using HubSpot we outgrew the "honeymoon phase" as we started running into limitations with the platform, mostly involving integrations with other tools we use. At the end of the day, HubSpot is phenomenal at what it does but has real limits to it's function and flexibility-- it doesn't scale comfortably to larger enterprise companies/databases. If HubSpot fits within the scope of your company's marketing needs, it's a delight to use. HubSpot is built by marketers for marketers and it's run by a very human company that injects soul and purpose into it's products.

Improvements I'd like to see:
• Better CRM function-- it was too limited for us to use
• Greater flexibility with reporting custom dashboards
• Ability to use spend/budget data from LinkedIn Ads connection
• Ability to A/B test automated emails without workaround

The customer service team is excellent and there is a handy chat function so you don't have to wait on an email response. For social media, you can schedule posts months in advance and view your marketing activities as a monthly calendar. Landing pages are also easy and quick to set up. This is a great tool for smaller organizations with limited contacts or leads to store who need basic marketing support.

The company continues to make unnecessary updates with little notice that often seems to decrease the functionality of the tool until the changes are reversed. Email is very difficult to use as the template you set up views very differently across multiple popular email platforms (to be fair, this is likely an issue with any email automation software). You also have to change your template in a different view pane from your actual email so you're constantly switch back and forth between views for very minor changes. The simplest spacing adjustment takes forever. However, the contact database portion of Hubspot is where we have the most trouble as it's hard to sort and group leads with any way other than by making smart lists or using personas. Your database will get messy fast and there's very little way to clean it if you are a large company which means over time you will be paying for useless leads in your system you cannot find and eliminate.

Hubspot is amazing, with great tools for list building, segmentation and email marketing. The process for building emails is easy and enjoyable and the workflow automation is a breeze. I've used MailChimp and Pardot and Hubspot is very different from either of those. Hubspot is for the company that's ready to up their marketing game to the next level while still being simple enough that your team can be onboarded and working quickly.

I'm not really a fan of the blog and landing page functionality and i really think you should do those on your own website and then tie them into Hubspot, which is fairly simple to do. Also, when you get into "Deals" and integrating sales and reporting from other systems, the simplicity goes out the window. It can still be done, but it's not as easy as the email marketing functionality.
Also, Hubspot has its own language and terminology, so it can be a bit confusing until you get used to it.